


A Moment's Peace

by chaya



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/M, First Time, Hot Springs & Onsen, Molly AND Caduceus
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-09
Updated: 2018-11-08
Packaged: 2019-08-20 21:03:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16563092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaya/pseuds/chaya
Summary: Fjord and Jester have revealed some feelings, but haven't had time to themselves yet.





	1. Chapter 1

“This is the only kind of water I’ll ever accept.”

Fjord looks and snorts at Nott, who’s up to her chin in the hot spring and looking more content than he’s seen her in weeks. “Too bad they’re so rare, then.”

“Then we’ll stop traveling,” Nott says primly. “It’s warm, it smells nice, you can’t drown. It’s perfect.”

“So I see.” Caleb, who’s sharing that side with her and Caduceus, reaches over to tip her head back gently and start washing her hair. She only peeks an eye open for a moment before allowing it.

“Maybe there’s a lot of crime in this little mountain town, we don’t know.” Jester shrugs her bare shoulders and looks around. “Lots of mysteries to solve? Missing people?”

“We’ve gotten better at those,” Fjord agrees.

“We still haven’t figured out where Yasha goes,” Beau mutters.

Jester lifts her hand out of the water, dripping, to pat Beau lightly on the top of her head. Beau frowns but endures it. “She’ll be back soon.”

“It’s  _fine_ , just,” Beau folds her arms over her chest. “You know, what if she needs help.”

“What if Yasha needs help,” Caleb echoes flatly, allowing the absurdity to set in.

“She’ll be fine,” Molly says with confidence. Caduceus nods in agreement and smiles genially, continuing to cup small handfuls of water and let them stream down his chest. (He’s the only one who isn’t at the very least up to their collarbones in water, but he’s hardly the type to complain.)

“Speaking of teamwork,” he adds thoughtfully, “didn’t the innkeeper mention something about a boar platter?”

Instantly distracted, Beau’s eyes snap open and lock on to him. “ _Yes_ ,” she hisses.

“What platter?” Fjord sits up straighter. “What’d I miss?”

Beau reaches across Jester to whack Fjord’s arm. “When we were booking the rooms, the guy, the big chubby half elf guy, he said there’s a group platter Friday nights that’s four silver but it’s FREE if you and four others can finish it in under half an hour, they sketch your pictures and put it on the WALL.”

“And it’s all boar?”

“Fall-off-the-bone boar, I believe he said.” Caduceus is grinning. “He described the marinade to me, although I didn’t want to press him for the complete recipe… it sounds lovely.”

“Are firbolgs cheating for a food competition?” Jester wonders aloud.

“He’s skinny, though,” Nott points out from just above the waterline.

“Really skinny types can pack away food,” Molly says. “We had a guy for a while who weighed not much more than Nott, and he’d fill up a tent just by sitting there eating one plate of chicken after the other.”

Jester’s eyes go wide. “How many would he eat?”

“You’d have to ask Yasha, she was usually the one who prepped his food, but.” Molly shrugs. “Probably seven?”

Caduceus frowns at this. “What race was he?”

“Human.” Molly lowers his voice a touch. “ _Allegedly_.”

Beau is counting heads. “We need four, who’s in? Caduceus? You ready for a new experience?”

“I’m not sure that kind of experience would agree with me, but I’d be happy to come along and cheer.” He tilts his head in apology.

“I’m in,” Molly says. “If we start losing, that’s what long sleeves and secret pockets are for.”

“Pocket chicken,” Nott says thoughtfully.

Beau turns to her. “Nott, you want in?”

“I think that might be too much attention for her,” Caleb says worriedly, and Nott nods agreement.

“You, then.” Beau points at him. “Skinny human man.”

Caleb rolls his eyes.

“Skinny human man,” Molly singsongs, making Fjord snort. “Skinny human man needs boar.”

“Thank you for literally comparing me to a  _side show_.”

“Hey,” Molly says, pretending to be wounded by his tone.

Beau looks to Jester. “You hungry? You can fuck up some food.”

Jester can, Fjord knows this, but she’s shrugging indifferently. “I think I might soak a little longer. I still feel like I have swamp gunk between my toes.”

“Skinny human man,” Molly’s humming under his breath, pretending to serenade Caleb. “Come eat boar with us. Come eat too much. Come be victorious.”

“Please stop singing.”

“I will if you come.”

“Fine.”

“That’s three,” Beau says, looking around the circle. “Fjord?”

He feels a tail poke him in the side, and he straightens suddenly.

“Fjord, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he says. “Just trying to get a crick outta my back.” He puts a hand at his tailbone, pushing his shoulders back and chest forward, making a face. “Um. I’m kinda swampy too, and I’m not that hungry. Caduceus, you sure you won’t be their fourth?”

Molly looks at Fjord for a moment, then up to Caduceus. “I’ll teach you the sleeve trick,” he offers.


	2. Chapter 2

“Also, Beau is the real MVP here, she will legitimately eat half the plate.” Caleb gives Beau a respectful nod.

Caduceus considers this. “Alright,” he says. “I hope I don’t let you down.”

Caleb looks down to Nott. “Will you join us? And cheer?”

She squints up at him from her tiny nirvana. “For you,” she says slowly, after a long pause, “I will.”

“Great!” Beau’s grinning as she clambers out of the water, getting one of the towels from the pile and wrapping it around her armpits. As the others get out, she tosses them each one in turn. “It’ll be like Hupperdook.”

“You  _lost_  your drinking contest, Beau, if I remember correctly.”

“Fuck you, Molly.”

“What’s Hupperdook like?”

As the other four begin to tell Caduceus about the gnome town, their voices disappear around the corner to the changing rooms. Fjord looks down at the water, where Jester’s tail is still curled up between them. They sit in silence for a moment.

“You gotta warn me before you use that thing,” Fjord mutters with a grin. “It’s  _sharp_.”

“I just wanted a little more  _time_ ,” Jester says innocently, a flush on her cheeks as she smiles across the water at a carved fish hanging on the decorative wall.

Fjord rolls his eyes, smiling, and scoots close enough that he can lay a hand on her closer shoulder. “I shoulda thought of it too. Ever since the talk, uh, in the cart…”

“We haven’t been able to talk again?” she finishes. When she looks back to him, chin lifted slightly, Fjord can see the light sheen of sweat from the hot spring water, a few droplets clinging to her lashes and the ends of her hair. He swallows.

“You know, I,” he scrapes his teeth across his lip, feeling the new growth of his fangs rough against the soft skin. “What I was tryin’ to say, was. I guess even if I have feelings, when I’m focused on something, a  _mission_ , it. It all gets compartmentalized.” He shrugs. “You can’t be… distracted, or scared, or whatever, when you’re on a ship. You’ve got work to do, you can’t fuck it up, or people die.”

“And it’s kind of the same when we’re fighting giant badgers or whatever.”

He looks at her. “We have never… fought giant badgers.”

“Or  _whatever_ ,” she reiterates calmly. “I think I get it. I don’t… I don’t think I’m like that, but I’m not upset with you anymore.”

“But I’ll, um.” Fjord tries to save this opportunity. “I’ll try harder to… to switch gears, when, when the time allows for it.”

“Okay.” Jester sounds like she’s trying not to smile.

“Like, say, if we get some time alone on a nice mountain side,” Fjord says, feeling very smooth now, “with a pretty view of the treetops, and the water’s nice, and…”

“And we can sit naked and comfy and you can tell me how pretty I look.”

“Yeah,” Fjord says, mouth feeling a little dry and suddenly out of words. “Well, uh.” She’s smiling up at him, perfectly content and expectant, and he mentally begins to panic. “Well, you know, you look real sweaty. From the water, that is.”

Her nose wrinkles. “Fjord.”

“But in a good way! You look shiny. It’s. It’s pretty.” Fuck. “An’…”

He feels the water shift, and suddenly there’s a soft and pleasant warmth against his hip, against his side, and Jester is pressed very lightly against him and looking out over the treetops. He can feel her hair brushing against his arm, little indigo spirals in a messy sprawl, and as he looks where she’s looking, he can see a small flock of colorful birds taking off from a branch.

“You look very dashing,” Jester says. She’s still not looking at him, but rather almost reciting from memory. “You had some streaks of mud along your jaw, earlier, and that looked nice, but once you scrubbed yourself down in here your skin was extra dark green to go with your hair, and your scar stood out more, and it all looks very nice. Plus your fangs are growing in more, and you look handsome either way, but I think you look more handsome  _with_ your fangs.”

Fjord blinks a few times. “Th. Thank you, Jester.”

Jester nods. “And when you were kneeling in the water to scrub at your legs your tummy was sticking out, and I could see the muscles and the squish and it was very cute.”

“…thank you.”

Jester shrugs, as if it were nothing, and gently tilts her head to the side to rest her cheek on his shoulder. Her right horn scrapes harmlessly against his shoulder, carefully placed, and Fjord looks down at the picture they make and smiles a little. She looks calm, and focused, and  _not_  focused, like looking out at the mountains and the birds and talking about how she thinks Fjord looks allows her to not really think at all.

“I like bein’ here with you,” Fjord murmurs. “Even if I don’t always know what to say.”

“That’s okay.” Jester looks up at him, lips quirked in a little smile. “How long do we have this area rented for, anyway?”

“Molly put down enough gold for an hour,” Fjord says, and then frowns. “Fuck. He did that on purpose, didn’t he.”

“You know him, maybe he just wanted to give a little business a lot of money.”

“No, he was the first one to figure us out and he’s definitely tryin’ to…” Fjord gestures inarticulately and Jester laughs. “That li’l perv.”

“You’re so stuck up!” Jester leans against him in a gentle, friendly shove. Something in his stomach flips as he’s reminded how close she is, but he tries to keep his cool. “I think it was nice of him.”

“Yeah, I just.” Fjord works his jaw a second and decides he should probably say it. “I know you come, uh, from an unusual background… but I’d. I’d really hate to, you know, rush you into something.”

Her smile disappears. “Is that what you’ve been worried about?”

“I don’t know, I,” he shrugs. “We only… that talk in the cart was only a few days ago.”

“Nine days ago,” Jester says, looking a little shyly up at Fjord when he blinks at her. “I thought after we’d both said we liked each other, you’d…  try to get some time alone with me…”

The sentence trails off, a clear question, and Fjord clears his throat.

“We were on the road. Hard to find privacy.”

Jester’s mouth twitches downward. “But you do  _want_  to?”

“Yeah, I just,” Fjord tries to think about how to put his feelings to words. He feels like he barely even  _knows_ his damn feelings, sometimes, pulled six different directions like he is, and with something always looming over their heads waiting to kill them. “Listen, it’s. Would you really want your first time to be in a forest?”

He feels, rather than sees, Jester shrug her shoulder against his.

“On a cold dirt ground?” Fjord steels himself and looks down at her. “It  _would_  be your first time, right?”

She scowls defiantly. “I don’t see why you have to do all this … this  _making the decision for me,_ you know, you can just say ‘hey Jester wanna make out ten minutes away from the campfire’ and I will say yes or no, right?”

“Are you mad I didn’t ask?”

“Maybe a little,” she says in a quiet voice, but she doesn’t sound mad. She sounds hurt.

Fjord cringes and takes a longer breath, going back to the drawing board. Okay. She’s not holding on for some storybook moment, she’s … maybe  _rushing_ , or at least he thinks so, but like she said, he’s maybe been making some decisions for her.

“I’m not some Casanova,” he says slowly, “who knows how do everything right. I don’t know how to … be romantic, or say the right things, and. A lotta girls want their first time to be special, and just right, and I got no idea what ‘just right’ is. And, honestly, I think I’d kinda hate myself if I got close to you and hurt you.”

“Oh, Fjord.” Her eyes go soft, and Fjord’s not sure what to do with that.

“I’m sorry.”

“No, that’s really  _sweet_.” Jester reaches a hand up and cups his chin, spring water warm and dripping against his skin. He smiles against her touch, flushing a little, and the moment pauses for a moment, just a moment, where they look at each other and Fjord realizes Jester is about to lean up and kiss him.

Deciding to make a point of learning from past mistakes, Fjord beats her to it, leaning down and pressing a chaste kiss against her mouth. It might be her first. It probably is. He presses in firmly, putting his larger hand over hers on his cheek. When he pulls back, her cheek is a darker blue, eyes wide, an awed and slightly mischievous smile playing on her lips.

“Changin’ your mind about likin’ me yet?” Fjord jokes.

Jester’s ears flick in amusement. “I dunno,” she says, biting her lip. “ _Yet_. Let’s try again.”

Fjord laughs. “Gotta be sure,” he says, and feels his heart stutter in his chest when he bends down again, kissing her more gently this time, feeling her fingers lace together around the back of his neck.

They break for air, but it’s only a few seconds before Jester licks hesitantly at Fjord’s mouth, initiating another kiss, and Fjord shudders. He’s more aware of the warm, soft press of her body along his than he was before; this isn’t a group bath house visit anymore, it’s just him and her, touching, a hot blush on her cheeks and looking like she’s waiting for him to touch her.

“Jester?” He tilts his head a little, lips brushing against her cheek.

“Hmm?”

“Can I-”

“Uh-huh.”

Fjord laughs. “I haven’t  _asked_  yet.”

“Well, ask faster.” Jester’s tail is making the water swish and move behind her, that familiar impatient back-and-forth he’s seen when the group has had to wait for service at an inn.

“Anybody ever tell you you’re incorrigible?” Fjord lifts a hand and starts to brush the loose strands of hair from her face, tucking them behind the cute little points of her ears. She beams as he does it, apparently very happy to be groomed and touched, so he finishes and keeps touching her, running his fingers along the shell of her ear, down her neck, making her shiver a little.

“ _Ask_ ,” she repeats, voice softer and a little huskier now.


End file.
